Book of Mormon text analysis -- computer study idea

[champatsch]

9 hours ago, James Tunney said:

I don't know that the burden should shift when the simple conclusion is that if there is early modern english in the book of mormon, it came from a desire to make the scripture look more authentic.

Here's the problem with this view, which is also a problem with Brant's, although I think he will say that it is Joseph Smith's pre-1830 dialect. The BofM is, over and over, not biblical in much of its morphological form and syntactic structures and phraseology. Nor is it pseudo-biblical, and these texts act as a control for what Joseph might have done from his own language. BofM language is very archaic, but its usage is distinct from King James style in so many domains.  In other words, we don't get the form and structure of BofM language from a desire on the part of Joseph Smith "to make the scripture look more authentic".

Here I will point out the inaccuracy of the following statement: “The Book of Mormon’s imitation of King James translation language and style is so obvious it does not need demonstration” (Gardner, The Gift and Power, 2011, 192). By 2011 all the evidence needed to avoid making this statement was available to scholars, thanks to Skousen’s 2009 Yale edition, his 6-part Analysis of Textual Variants, and the availability of the vast, searchable Early English Books Online database (there are currently approximately 25,000 publicly available Phase 1 texts, as well as almost 35,000 Phase 2 texts available by subscription). Indeed, five years earlier Skousen wrote this: “the biblically styled language of the text . . . does not imitate the specific language of the King James Bible (of course, the biblical quotes in the Book of Mormon do follow the King James text for the most part)” Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon (Provo, Utah: FARMS and BYU, 2006), 3:1393–94 (emphasis added).

[champatsch]

18 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

Looking at the issues of plate text to English, we have to find someone who was a non-native Nephite speaker (reformed Egyptian) and someone who was native English--and if we accept the evidence you are suggesting, lived in England

By this do you mean two separate individuals or just one?

I can't remember the details of what I might have said at FAIR, but it could have been that the translation into English didn't have to be a one-time event.  There are various possibilities that we can reasonably imagine.  Anyway, it's all speculation because we can't know how the translation may have occurred in heaven from our limited perspective without specific revelation on the matter.  Nevertheless, the most likely scenario is that the Lord carried out a relatively free English-language translation in heaven, and the delivery was tightly controlled, but allowed for human error.

[Brant Gardner]

11 hours ago, champatsch said:

Here I will point out the inaccuracy of the following statement: “The Book of Mormon’s imitation of King James translation language and style is so obvious it does not need demonstration” (Gardner, The Gift and Power, 2011, 192). By 2011 all the evidence needed to avoid making this statement was available to scholars, thanks to Skousen’s 2009 Yale edition, his 6-part Analysis of Textual Variants, and the availability of the vast, searchable Early English Books Online database (there are currently approximately 25,000 publicly available Phase 1 texts, as well as almost 35,000 Phase 2 texts available by subscription). Indeed, five years earlier Skousen wrote this: “the biblically styled language of the text . . . does not imitate the specific language of the King James Bible (of course, the biblical quotes in the Book of Mormon do follow the King James text for the most part)” Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon (Provo, Utah: FARMS and BYU, 2006), 3:1393–94 (emphasis added).

Of course, the actual problem is more complicate than the simple statement, because it assumes that everyone is talking about the same thing and that therefore we can make simple comparisons and conclusions. Quite apart from the description of the grammar and vocabulary of the Book of Mormon, it falls into a category of books that were written in language that was intended to imitate the King James Bible. Even if you suggest that the grammatical forms were earlier, that earlier writer was writing to imitate scriptural language. 

The specifics of the description of the grammar of the text doesn't change the text. What it does is allow the suggestion that Joseph did not participate in the translation. If we accept that hypothesis, we are left with many more questions--none of which have any answers, let alone good ones.

Now, I do have to point out that comparing what I have said to what James Tunney has said is also misleading, since his questions (without having read much, if any, of the literature on the subject) are intended to question the authenticity of the text as a translation at all--whereas I fully accept that it was divinely translated. That qualitative differences suggests that we require a little more nuance in discussing the two positions.

[Brant Gardner]

9 hours ago, champatsch said:

By this do you mean two separate individuals or just one?

For me, that is a moot question since I accept Joseph rather than any unidentified person or persons from perhaps a hundred years earlier.

Quote

Nevertheless, the most likely scenario is that the Lord carried out a relatively free English-language translation in heaven, and the delivery was tightly controlled, but allowed for human error.

At least this sentence gets us closer to agreement that it has appeared in the past. In the terminology I have been using, this was a functional translation was recorded accurately as Joseph pronounced it. That lets us agree on both the nature of the translation and the nature of the transmission. We are disagreeing on the person of the translator, but it is nice to know that we really don't have issues of translation. "Relatively free" and "functional" are sufficiently interchangeable as to make no difference--at least to me.

Edited October 20, 2016 by Brant Gardner

[Calm]

Would one or both of you define "relatively free" and "functional" for those of us who are occasional readers of this topic and want to make sure we are understanding terms correctly?  Thank you.

 

[Brant Gardner]

34 minutes ago, Calm said:

Would one or both of you define "relatively free" and "functional" for those of us who are occasional readers of this topic and want to make sure we are understanding terms correctly?  Thank you.

When a translator renders one language into another there are a number of ways it can be done. One is a very strict word for word process--in the most extreme, this renders a very difficult text to read in the target language--particularly if there are large differences between the two languages. A functional translation attempts to be faithful to the intent of the source text, but may translate meaning rather than the words. For example, idioms rarely translate well--but translating one idiom with an idiom in the target language that gives the meaning/intent of the original would be a functional translation. 

champatsch will please add to or correct my understanding of "relatively free," but I see that as having a similar relationship with the original text as a functional translation does. That is, we may not have the word for word translation, but the intent of the original is transmitted. Since that is the first time I have seen champatsch offer that particular description, I am also quite interested in learning more about how he sees the relationship of the original language to the target language--which is English, in the case of the Book of Mormon (and a version of Early Modern English in his particular analysis).

[Calm]

Thank you.  This has been a very interesting discussion and as soon as champatsch gets up to 25 posts, I plan on giving him lots of rep points as well.

[Brant Gardner]

2 hours ago, Calm said:

Thank you.  This has been a very interesting discussion and as soon as champatsch gets up to 25 posts, I plan on giving him lots of rep points as well.

As well you should.

[Robert F. Smith]

On 10/18/2016 at 9:48 PM, James Tunney said:

I don't know that the burden should shift when the simple conclusion is that if there is early modern english in the book of mormon, it came from a desire to make the scripture look more authentic.  Also, english is a germanic language. Couldn't it be that the early modern english found is like the remnants of the older forms of german found in english?  How long does an old form take to leave a language as it evolves?  My understanding is that it takes a long time. This is one of the reasons why the tower of babel story is readily debunked.  Also, aren't there dutch and french influences as well?  So, is the book of mormon somehow true because there are remnants of older forms in english that are in the book of mormon?  So, I think you are declaring too early a victory with your burden shifting claim.

I don't understand the "victory" you loosely speak of.  What victory?  Over what or whom?  Who won?  Since you are unfamiliar with the scholarly discussion, your comments here make no sense at all.  All the evidence thus far indicates that Early Modern English was extinct long before Joseph Smith was born.  That means that it did not survive in some backwater somewhere.  That means that Joseph did not do the translating.  He merely read it to his scribes.  No one has yet been able to adequately explain what those simple facts mean.  Perhaps you'd like to give it a shot.

On 10/18/2016 at 9:48 PM, James Tunney said:

Benjamin to mosiah seems to be a clear error.  Maybe it is like having a machine gun or an airplane appear in a supposed history about the roman siege of jerusalem in 70 a.d.?   I know Fair conveniently blames it on mormon or moroni .....

I don't know what FairMormon has done with the question, but many scholars and ordinary people have taken the time to express their opinions.  What is the basis for your declaration that some aspect of it (Benjamin or Mosiah) is "a clear error"?  And how is that tantamount to a machine gun or aeroplane showing up in A.D. 70?  Have you even bothered to read scholarly discussions of that issue, James?  The most recent discussion looks at the various arguments:  Book of Mormon Central, “Which Nephite King Had the Gift of Interpretation? (Mosiah 21:28, 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon),” KnoWhy #99, May 13, 2016, online at https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/content/which-nephite-king-had-the-gift-of-interpretation . 

[James Tunney]

9 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

I don't understand the "victory" you loosely speak of.  What victory?  Over what or whom?  Who won?  Since you are unfamiliar with the scholarly discussion, your comments here make no sense at all.  All the evidence thus far indicates that Early Modern English was extinct long before Joseph Smith was born.  That means that it did not survive in some backwater somewhere.  That means that Joseph did not do the translating.  He merely read it to his scribes.  No one has yet been able to adequately explain what those simple facts mean.  Perhaps you'd like to give it a shot.

I don't know what FairMormon has done with the question, but many scholars and ordinary people have taken the time to express their opinions.  What is the basis for your declaration that some aspect of it (Benjamin or Mosiah) is "a clear error"?  And how is that tantamount to a machine gun or aeroplane showing up in A.D. 70?  Have you even bothered to read scholarly discussions of that issue, James?  The most recent discussion looks at the various arguments:  Book of Mormon Central, “Which Nephite King Had the Gift of Interpretation? (Mosiah 21:28, 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon),” KnoWhy #99, May 13, 2016, online at https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/content/which-nephite-king-had-the-gift-of-interpretation . 

Let me ask you this:  Given that there are a lot of biblical quotes or similar passages to the bible in the book of mormon and given that the 1611 King James Bible and the Tyndale Bible (written in EModE) were still around at Joseph Smith's time, isn't it plausible that Joseph Smith used the older translations to make his work look more ancient?  He could have also consciously or unconsciously adopted some EModE in other areas of his invention as well after continuously reading the older EModE versions of the bible. 

Additionally, changing benjamin to mosiah had to happen otherwise Ammon and Moroni would have been talking about someone who had already died.

[Brant Gardner]

1 hour ago, James Tunney said:

Let me ask you this:  Given that there are a lot of biblical quotes or similar passages to the bible in the book of mormon and given that the 1611 King James Bible and the Tyndale Bible (written in EModE) were still around at Joseph Smith's time, isn't it plausible that Joseph Smith used the older translations to make his work look more ancient?  He could have also consciously or unconsciously adopted some EModE in other areas of his invention as well after continuously reading the older EModE versions of the bible. 

The translation issues for the passages that appear nearly the same in the Book of Mormon and any edition of the Bible is different from the rest of the text. If you read the articles on early modern English, you will find that your suggestion has already been dealt with. It does help to become familiar with the arguments that have already been made before repeating them.

Quote

Additionally, changing benjamin to mosiah had to happen otherwise Ammon and Moroni would have been talking about someone who had already died.

Clearly, you did not take advantage of the link Robert Smith provided, else you would know that this comment also has a very logical answer. In the context of the original, Benjamin was "correct," but your confusion on the topic is pretty common for modern readers and was therefore changed to make it easier on the modern reader.

Once again, I suggest that you at least attempt to become informed--particularly when all you had to do was follow a link and read perhaps one page of information.

[champatsch]

On 10/18/2016 at 4:18 PM, Brant Gardner said:

we have to find someone who was a non-native Nephite speaker (reformed Egyptian) and someone who was native English--and if we accept the evidence you are suggesting, lived in England.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in this quote I find that you have determined that these types of translators are required by tight control.

In thinking about the question of loose control (ideas into words), I think it has been established here that various extraordinary, archaic linguistic features of the BofM must have been part of Joseph Smith's early spoken dialect (pre-1830s), which was basically a rural New England - New York dialect, and difficult to pinpoint. These features would have been different from systematic biblical usage or written usage of the time, otherwise we would accept them unproblematically as flowing from Joseph's knowledge of King James English and standard American English.

One of these features is the past-tense usage of the BofM. Joseph's dialect must have maintained a 16th-century form of this, since the overall rate is very high in the BofM (about 30%) and did + infinitive adjacency is slightly greater than 90% and there is very little subject-did inversion or adverbial intrusion. This, according to Ellegard (1953: 162, 182), is a best-match with 16th-century averages, when the usage arose. By the 17th century, this syntactic distribution had already shifted in writing: there were lower overall non-emphatic periphrastic did rates and there was more subject-did inversion and more adverbial intrusion. Very low rates and inversion and intervening adverbials are what we see in pseudo-biblical texts.  The 17th-century system is the type that was more likely to have persisted in dialects. But the 16th-century system is what must have been in Joseph Smith's early dialect under loose control. And from all the periphrastic do/did studies I've read, it seems highly unlikely to have been a part of his dialect. In addition, we see no evidence of it in locally published writings.

The second point I'd like to mention here is the {-th} plural (usually with third-person plural subjects). Already in the early 17th century third-person singular {-th} was diminishing rapidly in usage, giving way to the dominance of {-s}. Roger Lass (CHEL, 3:164) provides good evidence that 17th-century writings were conservative and maintained {-th} even when it wasn't spoken that way. So the written standard was conservative and spoken dialects were shifting strongly to {-s} in this century.  Hence it is unlikely that Joseph's early 19th-century spoken dialect maintained the {-th} singular, and so it is extremely unlikely that the Early Modern English {-th} plural that we see throughout the BofM (and not in the KJB) was part of any dialect in the early 19th century. In writing, the {-th} plural is very rarely seen with auxiliary verbs in the early 19th century; in the BofM it is fairly common with main verbs as well as auxiliary verbs. I have called the {-th} plural usage of the BofM an eModE usage because the match is solid: there is (relative) underuse after pronouns, and (relative) overuse after relative pronouns and conjunctions, just like in former times (it was always the less-common option in the past and is a less-common variant in the BofM).

These are two systematic items that must have been in Joseph's primitve dialect. There are many other items that could be pointed out, but I will stop here. If we multiply all the unlikely and highly unlikely features of the BofM together, we obtain an extremely low probability of co-occurrence for these various extraordinary, archaic features in Joseph Smith's dialect.  This then tells us that we must take seriously archaic vocabulary that is extra-biblical. It is unlikely that "counsel the Lord" meaning 'consult the Lord' was in Joseph's dialect, and that "but if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit" meaning 'unless' was in his dialect.

[champatsch]

2 hours ago, James Tunney said:

isn't it plausible that Joseph Smith used the older translations to make his work look more ancient?

You don't really take seriously the notion that Joseph Smith was a philologist in 1828, do you?

Anyway, the problem with this latest attempt to explain the BofM translation naturalistically, is that much of the archaic, extra-biblical usage of the BofM is not in early English Bibles. For instance, we don't find "had been spake" (Alma 6:8) in 16th-century Bibles, but we can find it in the 17th century.  We don't find "of which hath been spoken" (Helaman 16:16; Ether 13:15; witness statements) in these Bibles, but we do find it occasionally in the 17th century. We don't find "they who art" (Alma 32:15) in eModE Bibles, but we do find this construction uncommonly in the early modern period.  Again, under loose control, these structures and many other seemingly anomalous forms must have been part of Joseph's primitive spoken dialect.

[James Tunney]

2 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

The translation issues for the passages that appear nearly the same in the Book of Mormon and any edition of the Bible is different from the rest of the text. If you read the articles on early modern English, you will find that your suggestion has already been dealt with. It does help to become familiar with the arguments that have already been made before repeating them.

Clearly, you did not take advantage of the link Robert Smith provided, else you would know that this comment also has a very logical answer. In the context of the original, Benjamin was "correct," but your confusion on the topic is pretty common for modern readers and was therefore changed to make it easier on the modern reader.

Once again, I suggest that you at least attempt to become informed--particularly when all you had to do was follow a link and read perhaps one page of information.

Can't I ask these questions now?  Does one have to have a degree to be worthy to disagree with yours or your colleagues' claims?  With all due respect, Joseph Smith claimed he got the book of mormon by looking at a rock or rocks (if one believes the dubious urim and thumin claims).  To the outside world and a lot within mormonism, that claim screams fraud.  Even Joseph Smith ran away from his treasure seeking origins stories later.  So, how about giving the unbeliever a break?  Perhaps you and your colleagues shouldn't be so quick to give reading assignments and instead just simply answer the questions, that is if you can.  Although giving reading assignments and making claims that the question has already been answered without actually answering the question is certainly a nice way to silence questioners.

[Brant Gardner]

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in this quote I find that you have determined that these types of translators are required by tight control.

Darn, now we are back to definitional issues. Ben McGuire's FairMomon presentation had a good model to help sort things out. The process that must have happened has the following stages:

1) Mormon et al wrote in Reformed Egyptian (whatever else we think it might have been, it certainly wasn't any version of English).

2) That text had to be translated into some form of English.

3) Joseph dictated a text to Oliver (and other scribes)

4) Oliver (or other scribes) wrote it down, and the evidence is that they did a pretty good job of recording as they heard it.

Now for definitions. Tight control, as Skousen defined it, is between steps 3 and 4. I agree with that. What has happened is that process has been labeled "translation" rather than transmission, and therefore the issue gets confused.

Translation occurred between 1 and 2. The concepts that Mormon (and others) wanted to communicate were translated into English, but there is no evidence that from 1 to 2 represents a word for word, or even close to word for word, translation. 

The next issue is who performed step 2. That is a different issue than the nature of step 2 or 4. I believe we can also assume that Joseph accurately dictated the result of step 2, regardless of how step 2 was generated. 

Quote

In thinking about the question of loose control (ideas into words), I think it has been established here that various extraordinary, archaic linguistic features of the BofM must have been part of Joseph Smith's early spoken dialect (pre-1830s), which was basically a rural New England - New York dialect, and difficult to pinpoint. These features would have been different from systematic biblical usage or written usage of the time, otherwise we would accept them unproblematically as flowing from Joseph's knowledge of King James English and standard American English.

I agree that there is a problem in determining a specific person's dialect. As you know (but for the benefit of others reading this), regional dialects are statistical generalizations, not normative rules. A dialect is a living thing, and can be extracted from usage. Nevertheless, the specifics of a person's dialect is a combination of a lot of things and discernible only with a lot of data--and we just don't have it for Joseph. I suspect that we can find more than we may have looked for, but I agree that it is problematic.

I agree that there are features in the Book of Mormon that deviate from KJV English, and standard American English. However, I sincerely doubt that Joseph spoke standard American English. What data we do have shows that Joseph's use of English improved over time and became more standard, but that means that it wasn't in the beginning. That is hardly unusual in a rural area, and continues in many rural areas in modern rural dialects. What was once acceptable in early modern English became "errors" over time and changing public acceptance--but that doesn't mean that the forms die out entirely--only that they are not standard.

Quote

By the 17th century, this syntactic distribution had already shifted in writing: there were lower overall non-emphatic periphrastic did rates and there was more subject-did inversion and more adverbial intrusion. Very low rates and inversion and intervening adverbials are what we see in pseudo-biblical texts. 

Note the "already shifted in writing." Yes. That highlights the problem of discerning retention of such things in an oral dialect. Writing encourages and speeds normalization, but only among the literate--those who read and then produce writing. In oral communities, some features hold on--and that is the problem we have for Joseph. Using exclusively literate examples to date oral dialects opens the problem of false positives--assuming that an absence in literary sources necessarily indicates and absence in oral dialect.

Quote

Hence it is unlikely that Joseph's early 19th-century spoken dialect maintained the {-th} singular, and so it is extremely unlikely that the Early Modern English {-th} plural that we see throughout the BofM (and not in the KJB) was part of any dialect in the early 19th century. In writing, the {-th} plural is very rarely seen with auxiliary verbs in the early 19th century;

Were Joseph an accomplished writer, I would certainly agree. However, we are back to the problem is literary production versus oral dialect. Apples and oranges. It isn't linguistics, but the folk practices that included seer stones had largely faded in England when they were still active in New England--and showing characteristics that show that the concepts had been imported with the early settlers, but retained in New England where they had largely faded in England. Although language and folk belief are not the same, they respond to the same kinds of social-historical pressures. Showing that certain folk practices were no longer current in England, or in the US cities, does not indicate that they were also obsolete in the rural regions. The difference is that we have data, so we can demonstrate their persistence. More data will help resolve the questions.

Quote

These are two systematic items that must have been in Joseph's primitive dialect. There are many other items that could be pointed out, but I will stop here. If we multiply all the unlikely and highly unlikely features of the BofM together, we obtain an extremely low probability of co-occurrence for these various extraordinary, archaic features in Joseph Smith's dialect.  This then tells us that we must take seriously archaic vocabulary that is extra-biblical. It is unlikely that "counsel the Lord" meaning 'consult the Lord' was in Joseph's dialect, and that "but if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit" meaning 'unless' was in his dialect.

Yes, that is the problem. These elements were either part of Joseph's oral dialect, or they were not. I agree that we have two choices. I am uncomfortable assuming that there must have been some other person that the Lord had do the translation rather than Joseph based on the assumption that these elements could not have been part of his dialect. There are some elements that do appear in his writings, but we have such a paucity of data that the absence of examples can be just as easily explained by the absence of data as by the absence of the elements in the dialect. There is a statistical reason for assuming that those elements had disappeared from standard American English, but the is every indication that Joseph's dialect wasn't standard American English.

We really need more data, and data that is specific to the regional dialect--since I doubt we will get a lot more on Joseph's personal dialect (though family writings will certainly help). I wish I had better access to those sources so I could check, but I do not.

 

[Brant Gardner]

37 minutes ago, James Tunney said:

Can't I ask these questions now?  Does one have to have a degree to be worthy to disagree with yours or your colleagues' claims? 

Degrees are not required. Disagreement has no requirements at all. Heaven knows message boards are ample proof of that.

However, if reasons for disagreement are to be discussed, then there is an assumption that there is some understanding of the issues. 

[Glenn101]

4 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

Yes, that is the problem. These elements were either part of Joseph's oral dialect, or they were not. I agree that we have two choices. I am uncomfortable assuming that there must have been some other person that the Lord had do the translation rather than Joseph based on the assumption that these elements could not have been part of his dialect. There are some elements that do appear in his writings, but we have such a paucity of data that the absence of examples can be just as easily explained by the absence of data as by the absence of the elements in the dialect. There is a statistical reason for assuming that those elements had disappeared from standard American English, but the is every indication that Joseph's dialect wasn't standard American English.

We really need more data, and data that is specific to the regional dialect--since I doubt we will get a lot more on Joseph's personal dialect (though family writings will certainly help). I wish I had better access to those sources so I could check, but I do not.

From what I can understand of champatsch's argument is that there is a very heavy Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon which had become pretty much extinct in written texts prior to the production of the King James Authorized Translation of the Bible. He has acknowledged that some elements had survived and that some are even found in the Joseph Smith papers. If I understand him correctly, he is saying that Joseph Smith's dialect would have had to be awfully heavy in those elements for him to have incorporated them into the Book of Mormon as it was originally dictated.

The Book of Mormon has been criticized from the very first because of its poor English grammar. However, I do not think that Joseph himself was accused of having an unusual grammatical affectation by any of his youthful contemporaries. Orsamus Turner, in his "History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham’s Purchase" noted that Joseph participated in a junior debating club during his time living near Palymyra and became a "passable orator." He does not intimate that Joseph had an unusual speech patterns. Although this is an argument from silence, he did excoriate the Book of Mormon roundly in that same book for "The bungling attempt to counterfeit the style of the Scriptures; the intermixture of modern phraseology; the ignorance of chronology and geography; its utter crudeness and baldness, as a whole, stamp its character, and clearly exhibit its vulgar origin."

Joseph's formative years were in Sharon, Vermont, which I have already noted, was hardly an isolated, backwoods area. Unless the common spoken dialects of Sharon, Vermont and Palmyra both retained large amounts of that same Early Modern English, it is likely, probable that a person speaking such a vernacular would have been noted. After all, differing accents and manners of speech are things that are more readily noted and remarked upon.

In another post champatsch noted "By the 17th century, this syntactic distribution had already shifted in writing: there were lower overall non-emphatic periphrastic did rates and there was more subject-did inversion and more adverbial intrusion. Very low rates and inversion and intervening adverbials are what we see in pseudo-biblical texts."

A reply by Brant was "Note the "already shifted in writing." Yes. That highlights the problem of discerning retention of such things in an oral dialect. Writing encourages and speeds normalization, but only among the literate--those who read and then produce writing. In oral communities, some features hold on--and that is the problem we have for Joseph. Using exclusively literate examples to date oral dialects opens the problem of false positives--assuming that an absence in literary sources necessarily indicates and absence in oral dialect."

Granted that certain artifacts from Early Modern English have survived to this day, but, and correct me if I am wrong, the written word is normally conservative in nature, i.e. it does not normally pick up readily on new uses except maybe to comment on them, or as quotes from a conversation. Take for example, the words "sick" and "bad." Among the younger element, 'bad" does not mean something awful always. It can mean something awesome. I can remember one of my daughters in her younger years watching a young singer emulate another popular singer, she exclaimed "that is so bad!" She was obviously enthralled by the performance, and bad there meant great as in awesome.

Monitoring a basketball message board, it is not uncommon for a poster to say something like "that was a sick move" to describe a skilled ball handler's action after he or she had faked out a defender and left them in the dust on the way to score a basket.

Now, I have yet to read an article, book, etc, which uses those words in their new context. I would think that when authors begin using phrases and words in new contexts, it is because they have become a normal and accepted part of the language. Changes in language, according to what I have read (and observed) often are fueled by the younger generation. The older generation generally is more resistant to changes in just about everything, including language and as the younger generation matures, the written compositions will gradually incorporate the newer words and structures. So, if the written compositions shift, it is because the language has shifted, mostly, except in isolated areas, as has been noted.

Tracing the history of the Smith family movements from American landing does not seem to show them sojourning in isolated areas. Especially not Sharon.

I am inclined thus to agree with champatsch (for what it's worth, my opinion, that is) that a heavy dose of Early Modern English in Joseph Smith's dialect is very unlikely.

Glenn

 

[strappinglad]

Is someone saying that during the translation/transmission Joseph saw the words in the seer stone/U&T and then superimposed his own dialect as he dictated? I find that problematic.

Also, would a tight translation from glyphic writing even be possible ? Not that we know much about the BoM characters .

[Robert F. Smith]

48 minutes ago, Glenn101 said:

................................................................

Tracing the history of the Smith family movements from American landing does not seem to show them sojourning in isolated areas. Especially not Sharon.

I am inclined thus to agree with champatsch (for what it's worth, my opinion, that is) that a heavy dose of Early Modern English in Joseph Smith's dialect is very unlikely.

Glenn

I have to agree, Glenn.  I just don't see how Early Modern English could have survived the centuries in pristine form and suddenly appeared in the BofM in 1829.  Just doesn't make any sense.  We can examine the local dialects near Palmyra in Frances M. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1832/ reprint N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1901), online at http://books.google.com/books?id=QFhLQZ0K67kC&printsec=frontcover&dq=domestic+manners+of+the+americans&ei=5okdS8y-Mon4zAS1iImaAw#v=onepage&q&f=false , and we can similarly examine the travelogues of other visitors:  Mr. Fawkes, Mr. Fearon, Miss Harriet Martineau, Captain Marryat, Charles ****ens, American Notes, and Captain Basil Hall, Travels in North America (1829).  To see whether they give evidence of local dialects.

However, even if Joseph had gotten his doctorate at Harvard while visiting his Uncle Jesse in nearby Salem, Mass, he still would not have had at his disposal the sort of scholarly apparatus now available to champatsch and his colleagues -- without which it would have been impossible to recreate and present such a dialect in systematic form.

[Robert F. Smith]

21 minutes ago, strappinglad said:

Is someone saying that during the translation/transmission Joseph saw the words in the seer stone/U&T and then superimposed his own dialect as he dictated? I find that problematic.

Also, would a tight translation from glyphic writing even be possible ? Not that we know much about the BoM characters .

John Sorenson and John Gee have each commented that hieroglyphs are often characterized by the presence of logograms in which one symbol contains an entire word, and Nibley showed that graphically in one of his books.  Not sure what a "tight" translation would mean in that context.

[Robert F. Smith]

12 hours ago, James Tunney said:

Let me ask you this:  Given that there are a lot of biblical quotes or similar passages to the bible in the book of mormon and given that the 1611 King James Bible and the Tyndale Bible (written in EModE) were still around at Joseph Smith's time, isn't it plausible that Joseph Smith used the older translations to make his work look more ancient?  He could have also consciously or unconsciously adopted some EModE in other areas of his invention as well after continuously reading the older EModE versions of the bible.

See my response to Glenn 101, but keep in mind that all sorts of archaic elements might survive in any given language.  That is quite normal, particularly in poetry.  However, we are not talking about the elements which did survive, but rather those which did not, and which constitute key grammatical elements of Early Modern English.  They had long since disappeared, and there was no way for Joseph to recreate them -- even if he knew of such linguistic phenomena.

12 hours ago, James Tunney said:

Additionally, changing benjamin to mosiah had to happen otherwise Ammon and Moroni would have been talking about someone who had already died.

The Book of Mormon Central discussion is short and non-scholarly.  Perhaps all of a page and a half at most.  You could at least avail yourself of that consideration of the various arguments (including yours), and then come back and explain what they got wrong.  I just don't see a problem.  Your refusal to carry on a meaningful discussion seems rather odd.  You are the one claiming that the original form is "clear error."  Can you support that claim?

[champatsch]

In looking for examples of "had not ought to + infinitive" one day, I encountered an 1822 book published in Buffalo, NY with at least 7 of these.  Tallcut Patching is the author's name, perhaps a pseudonym.  He grew up in Saratoga, NY, also lived in Danbury, CT and later south of Buffalo, NY. He fought in the War of 1812, part of the time on Lake Ontario, I think. Anyway, his dialect might not have been too different from Joseph Smith's since he grew up not too far from Vermont, and also lived in western New York. He uses "had (not) ought to + infinitive" liberally in this 453-page book, a usage which is criticized in contemporary grammars and a good marker of spoken American dialect (although it can be found in British publications too). The important thing is that he used this nonstandard language more than 20 times, so he clearly wasn't avoiding this dialectal speech in his writing.  I found no heavy affirmative declarative periphrastic did in the book. I only encountered a few examples of did+infinitive in 453 pages, and the BofM has more than 1,500 of them.

Also, when I was looking for modern instances of "had spake", which occurs in the BofM 12 times, I encountered an 1812 Troy, NY book with one example of "had spake". That is rare language in the 19th century (it's mainly an uncommon 17th-century usage).  Again, there was no ADP did in the text to speak of, besides inversion like "neither did they + infinitive", which persists today. (Shaker hymns at the end of the book have poetic examples.) These books also don't have the {-th} plural. It's very rare in the 19th century and we don't find the {-th} plural criticized in 19th-century grammars either, meaning it probably wasn't part of spoken dialects that could have made its way into writing, like "had (not) ought" and perhaps "had spake".

But I have concluded from the 1822 Buffalo, NY book and other evidence that "had (not) ought" in the BofM (29 times) is probably an exceptional case of American dialect. Because it is exceptional, Joseph Smith was probably not responsible for this dialectal language. He probably read it off the seer stone, like everything else.  There are cases of "had ought to + infinitive" in eModE, but they are very uncommon, and were probably a strong form of this verb, which also may explain its adoption for the text of the BofM, since it is generally speaking an emphatic text.  I haven't found a case of "had not ought to + infinitive" in the early modern period, however, which leads one to conclude that both positive and negative forms of "had ought" in the BofM are probably dialectal in linguistic origin, but part of the divinely prepared English-language text (i.e. not cases of dialectal overlay by either Smith or his scribes).

So we see that the BofM is an eclectic text, one that apparently borrowed from many diverse sources.  For instance, we have not found "it supposeth/supposes me that <sentence>" in the textual record. Of course, this simple dative structure matches the form of archaic language like "it seemeth me that S", which was most heavily used before the 17th century, when it became rare. The best match for "it supposeth me" is in a 1390 poem by Gower: "But all too little him supposeth".  This is the only verified case of the simple dative with the verb suppose.  That's eclectic.  The same thing could be the case with the verb stem molten.  While we find a number of modern written examples of the analogous dialectal verb stem engraven, in both British and American sources, before the BofM we have found only two instances of the verb stem molten, one from the early 15th century, and another from the late 18th century, both British. Because dialectal engraven clearly shows up in American writings, we reasonably conclude that if there had been American dialectal molten we would probably see it in the written record as well, but we don't (yet). If we find it in the future then we can call it American dialectal. Till then it's best classified as either a rare late Middle English variant, like "it supposeth me", or a rare modern British variant.

Tight control describes the English-language text of the BofM as eclectic, but principally Early Modern English in form and structure.

Loose control requires that many anomalous forms like "did molten" and "it supposeth me" were in Joseph's dialect, along with much other systematic usage, of which hath been spoken.

[James Tunney]

11 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

See my response to Glenn 101, but keep in mind that all sorts of archaic elements might survive in any given language.  That is quite normal, particularly in poetry.  However, we are not talking about the elements which did survive, but rather those which did not, and which constitute key grammatical elements of Early Modern English.  They had long since disappeared, and there was no way for Joseph to recreate them -- even if he knew of such linguistic phenomena.

The Book of Mormon Central discussion is short and non-scholarly.  Perhaps all of a page and a half at most.  You could at least avail yourself of that consideration of the various arguments (including yours), and then come back and explain what they got wrong.  I just don't see a problem.  Your refusal to carry on a meaningful discussion seems rather odd.  You are the one claiming that the original form is "clear error."  Can you support that claim?

Referring to benjamin when he had already died seems to have been a mistake.  Like I said earlier, Fair blames it on either mormon or moroni.  http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Mormon/Textual_changes/"Benjamin"_changed_to_"Mosiah"

[champatsch]

1 hour ago, James Tunney said:

Referring to benjamin when he had already died seems to have been a mistake. 

Of course it's possible that he hadn't died.

Quote

Pages 1420-1421 in ATV:

Summary: Despite the apparent difficulties with the original reading, the critical text will restore the name Benjamin in Mosiah 21:28 and Ether 4:1; the occurrence of Benjamin instead of Mosiah cannot be readily explained as an error in the early transmission of the text; moreover, the text can be interpreted so that Benjamin was still alive when the plates of Ether were delivered by king Limhi to king Mosiah, who then gave the Jaredite record to his father, king Benjamin, for his examination and perhaps safekeeping.

 

[Robert F. Smith]

7 hours ago, James Tunney said:

Referring to benjamin when he had already died seems to have been a mistake.  Like I said earlier, Fair blames it on either mormon or moroni.  http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Mormon/Textual_changes/"Benjamin"_changed_to_"Mosiah"

champatsch refers to ATV, which is Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, FARMS Book of Mormon Critical Text Project IV (FARMS, 2004-2006).